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Inside the Fibre Home

Sharing your Fibre Connection Inside your Home

Once your superfast fibre cable has been installed in your home you'll want to get all of your devices and members of the family up and running on the Internet. If you previously used an ADSL connection you'll find that fibre to the home is quite similar to use once it's in the house, but there are some differences you should know about.

The first thing you'll notice is an additional converter box, (which might look something like the picture) connected to the fibre optic cable that comes in from the street. This box is called an Optical network Terminal (ONT for short) and it's job is quite simply to convert the cable type from Fibre Optic to Ethernet which the rest of your devices will use.

ThE ONT will typically have a status light (often marked Optical, or WAN), which will be lit green if your fibre cable is healthy and correctly plugged in.

Before we move on: In our example above the Ethernet out, which connects to your WAN Router, comes from LAN 4 on the ONT. This may differ from one last mile fibre provider to the next, depending on how they are distributing the fibre connection into your home. This is because in some installations The local fibre Providers support multiple connections over the same fibre cable, or use the same fibre infrastructure for other specialized data services such as Voice Over IP, or CCTV security. If you are in modern apartment complex that was built with Internet users in mind you may not even have an ONT at all - just an Ethernet wall socket that's been hooked up to the building LAN! Don't worry though whatever solution you have your installer will make sure you know where everything is supposed to be plugged in.

Next up you will have a typical Internal router, of a similar type used for ADSL services, usually with a built in wireless hotspot. This is referred to as the WAN Router, because it acts as the bridge between the MWEB Wide Area Network (WAN) and the Local Area Network (LAN) inside your home.

The job of this router is to store your MWEB username and password and establish a special type of network "tunnel" back to MWEB's servers, which allows us to properly manage your traffic and record your usage according to the product you've purchased. It also converts public network addresses into private addresses that it can assign to all of the cabled and wireless devices in your house (the network geeks call this NAT, or network address translation).

Unlike ADSL which has a telephone cable plugged into the router your WAN Router will be plugged into the ONT using a normal Ethernet cable. routers which are only for WAN connections will have an extra dedicated Ethernet port labelled WAN. other routers, such as the one in our picture can be used for both ADSL and Fibre Connections and may convert one of the normal Ethernet ports on the router into a WAN port.

From there you will run Ethernet cables to the various devices in your home, or connect them up over Wifi. When connecting up the devices in your home, you should always consider what that device will be using the connection for when deciding between a cabled or wireless connection.

High performance gaming and high quality video streaming will always work better over an Ethernet cable and if you've chosen a faster Fibre connection the connection to some of your devices over Wifi, may actually be slower than your Internet Connection!

Once your Fibre to the Home connection is up and running you use the MWEB Speed Test to see how it's performing.